All posts tagged with "beta"

Dredmor Beta v0.93.2 : Crafting & Traps

March 28, 2011 by David Baumgart

0.93.2 is now out. The big piles of Fun here are crafting and traps. Shall I? Yes I shall: Let’s start with a screenshot.

Click to view full size.

I’ve got just about the full array of crafting skills here and am in the process of making some gold ingots to sell to Brax, whose potion shop I am standing in. The distilling widget has an outline of an apple in the ingredients box because I’ve selected the “Hard Cider” recipe.

You can also drag the inventory bag around to keep it in less-annoying spots on the screen. Yes, Dredmor is on the bleeding edge of  UI design!

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Dredmor Skill Icons

January 28, 2011 by David Baumgart

I’ve just finished the latest round of revisions to the entire pile of spell icons. This is just one task which is part of the massive spell overhaul we’re doing for Dredmor’s beta 0.92 (when I’m not getting distracted drawing the disembodied heads of founding members of Gaslamp Games).

Man, there are a lot of these buggers, but they do get easier (and better) every time I redraw them. Telling you anything about them would ruin the fun*, so I’ve just thrown together a collection of some of my favorite spell and skill icons for your enjoyment:

Still have to draw animated effects for most of these. Urrgh.

* whereas “the fun” refers to how much fun I have as people try to guess what the hell some of these skills do.

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Dredmor v0.90 Screenshots

January 10, 2011 by David Baumgart

For your viewing pleasure I’ve taken some new screenshots of Dredmor in fabulous HD-o-vision for you to pick over and tear apart, pixel by pixel.

Dungeons of Dredmor beta screenshot showing Octo interrupting cheese-plundering Dungeons of Dredmor beta screenshot skill tome, choosing skills

1. An Octo has rudely interrupted my cheese-plundering. And those skull bolts are amazing, except they’re doing the wrong damage type right now.

2. Deciding what skill to upgrade next; I settled on taking the next level of Dual Wield because it increased my ability to counterattack.

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The Part Of Making Games That Isn’t Making Games

June 24, 2010 by David Baumgart
  1. Make game
  2. ???
  3. Profit!

Something is missing here, see, and what’s missing is what really does the trick for the commercial indie game development thing. It is those developers that can fill in point number 2 that are successful, I think, regardless of any sort of brilliance in point number 1 (and sometimes making up for a lack of it).

We’re all doing something to carry some of the weight of step two, Derek handling hosting and coding online things, Daniel spearheaded incorporation and is our business guy probably because everyone else hates the idea of doing it more, and Nicholas has shadowy “industry connections”.

As for me? I do art. And it turns out there’s more to a game than the graphics.

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The Interaction Problem

June 3, 2010 by David Baumgart

Oh playtesting, how you tear down my illusions, besiege the fortress of my ego then poison its well and set fire to its stores of grain.

Fig. 1: The good part of Dredmor’s interactivity.

It is shocking just how surely a player will ignore tutorial text. The help button is effectively invisible, ignored, the text left sad and unread. Whatever it is, the “go away” button is clicked via Skinnerian response to years of training at ignoring inane popups. Yes, Nicholas passed me a link (or possibly a newer one) to Jeff Atwood writing on the subject when this issue of the tutorials being completely ignored came up, and it got me thinking.

Fig 2. The bad. Don’t ask why it says “Axe” on that lightbulb.

We’ve got issues.

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Beta: From making a game to making a game good

June 1, 2010 by David Baumgart

Yes, this is how we do things at Gaslamp.

The other day I was banging on the latest release candidate for Dredmor’s Beta v0.2 for Nicholas and I noticed that rather than things simply not working or, worse, crashing the game I was coming up with more issues that had to do with balancing and tweaking the game. It’s a fine point that we’re reaching; This is turning into an exercise not of making a game anymore, but of trying to make a game good.

It’s a good place to be. Soon, I keep telling myself, it’ll happen.

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